Earlier this year, the nonprofit announced it would be building a new $12 million, 24,000-square-foot facility on a bend in the San Antonio River in the adjacent Big Tex commercial/retail development. But executive director Bill Fitzgibbons said recently that the organization will stay put in the Blue Star complex.

“This is the building we've had since the beginning and we want to stay in it,” Fitzgibbons said of negotiations to buy the space. “We would do a gut rehab, a significant rehab of the building, which would allow us to double our square footage from around 12,000 to 25,000 square feet. I would like, for instance, to increase our education facilities to 5,000 square feet, up from 1,500 square feet now.”

Fitzgibbons said an architect for the project has not been chosen, but “it will be a San Antonio architect.”

The budget for the purchase and renovation, which doesn't yet have a clear time frame, is around $12 million.

“We are in the process of organizing our capital campaign,” Fitzgibbons said. “I would say that if we can raise between $12 (million) and $15 million, that would give us enough money to redo the building and have some endowment to run it.”